Scores of users have taken to Twittter to report an outage in Facebook and Instagram tonight.

The most popular social media platforms in the world appear to have gone down this evening.

Somerset Live reports that a message appears for users trying to access Facebook.

This message reads: "Facebook is down for required maintenance right now, but you should be able to get back on within a few minute."

Several people have said they cannot log into Facebook today (Monday, September 3).

And on Twitter it is emerging that Instagram may be down too.

Two leading websites in the field of collating reports of website outages, downrightnow.com and downdetector.com both report Facebook is either "down" or having "service trouble". Downdetector.com reports this was since 4.50pm EDT.

Downdetector.com's live outage map shows the highest concentration of reports of Facebook being down is in Europe.

Downdetector.com outage map (Image: Downdetector.com)

WhatsApp too?

The Mirror is now reporting that WhatsApp has also gone down for users around the world. Many are being met with a blank black screen as they try and access Facebook, while others cannot connect to WhatsApp.

Any word yet from the social media giants?

Only Facebook, as of around 10.20pm.

An update from Facebook says it is down for maintenance, but some are getting an error code 1 or 2 when they try to log in.

Others are seeing the message: "Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue.

"We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minutes."

The outage appears to have affected users around the world, with thousands of reports. Facebook Messenger is also not working.

Another alert on Facebook read: "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."

Instagram's website displayed a similar message: "We couldn't connect to Instagram. Make sure you're connected to the internet and try again."

Meanwhile social media users are flooding Twitter bemoaning their lack of access to the sites. #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown is trending.

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